The 20 Best Electronic Albums of 2017

Dancing remains a collective enterprise, but the most exciting developments in electronic music this year tended to arise from deeply original and idiosyncratic visions. Ambient went globe-trotting, electro-pop turned liberationist, and footwork got completely retooled. Even reggaeton and dancehall proved fodder for slyly experimental treatments, while house and techno, those old standbys, were most exciting when they seemed closest to morphing into other, less recognizable sounds. It was a year in which there seemed to be little consensus about the way forward—but in spite of that, or maybe because of it, the margins were alive with creativity.

AZD

20

Actress’ first album in three years is quiet, understated, and characteristically cryptic. Reportedly inspired by the properties of chrome, it nevertheless hides considerable warmth within its quicksilver curves (at least compared with his usually chilly outlook). The lo-fi smudges of his previous records have largely been wiped clean, as if with hot breath and moleskin, replaced with digital synths that twinkle like LEDs. As ever, though, the UK producer’s signature mix of wistfulness and optimism remains constant.

Nídia É Má, Nídia É Fudida

19

Not only did the 20-year-old producer Nídia have a hand in “IDK About You,” one of the most electrifying songs on Fever Ray’s Plunge; the Portuguese-born, Bordeaux-based electronic musician helped push the Afro-Lusophone sound of batida forward with a debut album brimming with syncopated rhythms and unusually tactile percussive tones. Nídia É Má, Nídia É Fudida—a title that loosely translates as Nídia Is a Fucking Badass—confirms that she’s not riding anybody’s coattails.

Symbolic Use of Light

18

Unlike the full-on barrage of some of her DJ sets, UMFANG’s second album carries techno out toward its ambient outer limits. The tougher tracks here brush a thin varnish of synthesizer over skeletal drum-machine grooves; the dreamier sketches do without drums altogether, favoring diffuse keys and runny tone colors. All these tracks were either recorded in one take or made to sound like it, pared down to the point where every twist of a knob makes its impact deeply felt.

Short Passing Game

17

This vinyl-only gem didn’t come entirely out of nowhere, but close. The label behind it, Dublin’s fledgling Wah Wah Wino, has quickly become a cult fave among left-field diggers, but Davy Kehoe remains pretty much a mystery. But who needs a biography when there’s this much to unlock in the music itself: Head-over-heels krautrock tumble, drum-and-clarinet dub, motorik harmonica jams. At once pulse-raising and totally meditative, it’s as puzzling as it is viscerally gratifying.

Sophia Kennedy

16

As an American musician who lives in Hamburg and works in theater, Sophia Kennedy has an atypical profile for the electronic-music scene. Her day job rubs off on her debut album, a collection of winsome electro-pop songs crafted alongside Die Vögel’s Mense Reents: She has an ear for unusual melodies, captivating storytelling, and unforgettable turns of phrase (“Being lonely makes you special/But being special makes you lonely too”). As alternate-universe showtunes go, few make for a more life-enhancing daily soundtrack than these.

Rembo

15

Retreating to her studio late at night, after her family had gone to bed, Karen Gwyer channeled all the hard-charging urgency and psychedelic excess of her acclaimed live shows into a compact double LP: eight tracks, 40 minutes, not a sound or moment wasted. Her gleaming synths and throbbing drums are wild and wooly, yet they’re also ruled by an abiding sense of controlled severity—the fury of the focused mind.

New Energy

14

Since he went fully independent around the turn of the decade, Four Tet has been such a constant presence in so many areas—collaborating with Burial, Terror Danjah, et al; remixing Indian film music; and releasing a steady stream of singles—that it can be hard to remember that, until this year’s New Energy, he hadn’t put out a full album of new material since 2013’s Beautiful Rewind. Despite the record’s title, the sounds within—shuffling house beats, jewel-toned arpeggios, acoustic harp and kalimba—are hardly new; they’re the same as he’s been working with for years, just rendered with more grace and clarity than ever. The sense of familiarity makes the album that much more welcoming.

Arpo

13

Berlin-based producer Call Super’s second album builds on the unusual structures laid out on its predecessor, 2014’s Suzi Ecto, with rhythms that twist and pivot like the impossible architectures of Monument Valley. All that skitter gives Arpo the intricacy, and also the intimacy, of early Autechre, but keening clarinets and woody bass tones steer the music away from the airlessness of circuitry and back toward the overgrown chaos of the wild.

Fabriclive 94

12

In a year when house and techno sometimes didn’t seem like they had many surprises left in them, UK DJ Midland spun 74 minutes of mostly four-to-the-floor beats into a spellbinding excursion across moods both murky and ecstatic. In this Fabric set, electronic textures are dusted with a pearlescent shimmer as shapeshifting grooves carve a corkscrewing path through the darkest corners of the dancefloor.

Colón Man

11

This Jamaican duo and their signature eagle screech came swooping down right at the tail end of the year, just in time to upend everything you thought you knew about the state of dancehall in 2017. Forgoing vocalists, the better to let their spiky beats do all the talking, Gavsborg, Time Cow, Bobby Blackbird, and crew hone in on glassy, ultra-vivid timbres and elliptical rhythms forged from found sounds. It’s rare for Jamaican pop and experimental electronic music to find themselves so tightly interwoven.